Richard M. Nixon: Smoking Gun Tape

About the Author

Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, on January 9, 1913; he was the second of five sons of Frank and Hannah Nixon. His parents were devout Quakers of modest means who instilled in their son a powerful work ethic, a characteristic that was evident throughout Nixon's life. He excelled at school and graduated second in his class in 1934 from Whittier College, a Quaker school in Whittier, California. He won a full scholarship to Duke University Law School, graduated third in his class in 1937, and returned to Whittier to begin his law career. Despite his Quaker upbringing, Nixon served several years in a noncombat position in the South Pacific during World War II. Following the war Nixon was recruited by Republican businessmen in Whittier to run for Congress in California's twelfth district, a seat then occupied by the five-term incumbent Democrat Jerry Voorhis. Taking advantage of the growing fear of internal subversion during the early cold war, Nixon mounted a campaign that branded Voorhis as a Communist sympathizer because of his ardent support of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Nixon won the election, but his smear tactics polarized voters. While some saw him as a fearless patriot confronting the Communist menace, others saw him as a vicious opportunist willing to do anything to win. This duel public image followed Nixon throughout the remainder of his life.

Congressman Nixon rose quickly to national prominence through the 1948 House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of Alger Hiss, a former prominent member of the U.S. State Department accused of passing secret government documents to the Soviets. Nixon's aggressive questioning throughout the hearings was widely credited with a playing a key role in Hiss's eventual conviction on perjury charges. Nixon used his anti-Communist reputation to win a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1950, defeating the actress Helen Gahagan Douglas in another campaign dominated by smear tactics. Nixon's political star continued its rapid ascent with his election in 1952 as Dwight D. Eisenhower's vice president, but again, controversy surrounded his campaign. This time Nixon was accused of benefiting from a secret “slush fund” created by wealthy businessmen. Although Nixon preserved his place on the GOP presidential ticket, the slush fund incident added to the questions about his integrity. Thus, long before the Watergate scandal ended his political career, Nixon had developed a reputation as a cold-blooded politician who valued winning above all else.

As vice president, Nixon regularly advised Eisenhower on both political and national security issues and served as the nation's goodwill ambassador to the world. The vice presidency broadened Nixon's experience and raised his public profile so that he easily won the Republican Party's presidential nomination in 1960. He was defeated by John F. Kennedy in one of the closest elections in U.S. political history. Following his defeat Nixon resumed his career as a lawyer, but he also remained active in politics, running unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1962 and also campaigning on behalf of numerous GOP candidates throughout the nation. Although he was a private citizen after 1960, his hard work in the political trenches enabled him to secure the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, and this time he narrowly defeated the Democratic candidate, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Nixon became president of a nation deeply divided over the war in Vietnam. Although there were more than five hundred thousand U.S. troops in Vietnam by 1968, many Americans believed the nation was no closer to resolving the conflict. Large, vocal antiwar protests roiled the nation during the election year, and Nixon as president promised an end to the war honorably. To this end he promoted a policy of “Vietnamization,” which gradually withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, also sought an end to the Vietnam War by improving American relations with its cold war enemy the Soviet Union and with China in a strategy called détente. They believed that a combination of economic and military incentives offered to the Communist superpowers would enable the United States to safeguard its national security while spending less money on national defense. It would also give the United States a chance to persuade these superpowers to reduce their support to North Vietnam, thereby accelerating peace talks to end the war. Détente led to Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972 and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) with the Soviet Union in 1972, but it failed to hasten a peace treaty with North Vietnam. Nixon was finally able to conclude a treaty in January 1973 only by widening the war into neighboring Cambodia and intensifying the bombing of North Vietnam, ending America's long war in Vietnam.

While the focus of his presidency was foreign policy, some of Nixon's domestic policies continued to affect the nation into the twenty-first century. In 1971 he ended the Bretton Woods monetary system under which the United States had agreed since 1944 to redeem all its dollars for gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce. This action allowed the value of the dollar to be determined by the world currency market. Nixon also established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and signed into law the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. But after five employees of his reelection campaign were arrested at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972, most of Nixon's time and energy were devoted to covering up White House involvement in the crime. When the American people learned the extent of his involvement in the cover-up through the release of the Smoking Gun Tape, Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, to avoid impeachment. After his resignation, Nixon continued to try to influence national affairs through a series of books on American politics and national security. He died on April 22, 1994.